Related content

All government services must run on secure systems – HTTPS – so that all data is encrypted while users are using the service.

In addition they must use HSTS. This tells browsers that a service will only use secure connections and that information should be encrypted.

The service.gov.uk domain will only ever connect to government services via HTTPS from September, meaning that services that are only available over unsecured connections will stop working in modern browsers.

Alongside the updates to services, GDS has published guidance on how to implement secure email practices.

This includes an update to its DMARC - Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance – policy.

Any emails that do not have a DMARC policy set to the highest level, known as p=reject, by 1 October may have their emails rejected by external email providers, GDS said in a blogpost.

It said that, as a temporary measure, if teams can’t change their policy to p=reject, they should publish a record using p=none to override the default policy.